Would it surprise you to know that almost every Democratic plan for the development of "green" technology to fight climate change also includes a heavy IP protection regime, thereby ensuring limited access and deployment to world-saving innovations?
Mandatory IP protections on green technology are one of the sharpest, most obvious illustrations of how capitalism is pits us against the environment. Late capitalism also values the imaginary good (intellectual property) over actually manufacturing the stuff that IP describes
The ultimate irony of various trade deals where we gave up manufacturing capacity in exchange for global intellectual property protections (besides widespread unstoppable piracy, of course) is that it was used to invert and hollow out US corporations
Beyond the particular problems posed by locking down necessary green technology to extract unnecessary profit, the whole idea behind keeping our cutting edge technology out of China's hands is just stupid. How else are we going to get them off coal? How are we going to source Nd?
